This article was originally published in Domus 964 / December 2012
That Italians tend to consider whatever occurs in their
(our) country to be anomalous is not exactly anything new.
It has almost always been that way and, we might say, not
always apropos. If there is one sector, however, in which Italy
is undeniably unique it is architecture. For some years now,
certain statistics have been reverberating in this field like
disturbing mantras: one third of European architects are Italian.
Nearly one tenth of all architects worldwide are Italian. There
are more architects in Rome than in Sweden and Portugal
combined. Yet the (well-known) fact is that the corresponding
employment rates are far from even barely acceptable. It is clear
that somewhere, something is not working or has not worked at
a given moment in history. It is equally clear that a large part of
the problem has to do with the universities.
I doubt that anyone would be shocked if I ventured to say that
for more than a few decades, architecture training at university
level in Italy has been going through a phase of profound crisis.
Even if we decide not to place blind trust in international
rankings — which in any case tend to be rather stingy when it
comes to Italian universities overall, generally including only
Bologna and La Sapienza among the world's top 200 — there must
be a reason why even the architecture schools with glorious
pasts cannot considered competitive on a global scale. Maybe
the problem is twofold, tradition versus the global scale.
Italian academia: a survey
Although the Italian university system turns out one third of Europe's and almost one tenth of the world's entire supply of architects, it has for decades been considered to be in a "state of crisis". A young architect crunches the numbers and proposes a few future scenarios.
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- Rossella Ferorelli
- 02 January 2013
- Milan
In terms of globalisation, our universities attract fewer international students than the European average, the scarcity of courses taught in English being the most obvious indicator. It can also be said that the mobility of our students is rather limited. The Erasmus programme works well (assuming that the European Union Budget Committee continues to finance it, which is anything but certain), but the gap between Italy's approach to student exchange and those of other countries is wide. Spain, for example, has instituted the Seneca exchange programme for student mobility within the country.
Nothing similar exists in Italy, and therefore the opportunity for exchange between students from different institutes is nearly nonexistent. The differences are even starker in comparison with the Scandinavian countries, where a year abroad (usually on sabbatical and frequently spent outside the continent) is a widespread practice for young graduates, who use the time to become independent from their families and make sounder career choices. In Italy, on the contrary, it is not uncommon for students to attend colleges in their cities of birth. If read casually, this fact might be interpreted simply as the acceptable result of a social structure that attributes greater value to strong family ties than elsewhere; however, it conceals the disturbing implication that universities are structured as a continuation of high school, substantially becoming a seamless extension.
The importance attached to architectural “theory” in Italy finds no outlet in practical matters
This is both the cause and the consequence of the excessive
proliferation of institutes throughout the country — institutes
that are limited in regard to their history, cultural influence
and drive to conduct research, to the point that they resemble
high schools more than universities, thus defeating perhaps
the most important function of the latter — being a place for
experimentation that fosters the theoretical and practical
progress of a discipline.
Here we come up against the problem of tradition. Much to our
chagrin, it is an annoyingly recurrent cultural issue in Italy, a
country that is continuously short of breath from chasing its
lost architectural identity. Much as we would like to pretend
otherwise education is still mainly shackled to the golden age
of Samonà, Rogers and Quaroni — in other words, the days when
Italy was indeed exporting method and culture. Tragic as it is,
we have to admit that even after four successive generations of
faculty members, the long-awaited reference-frame of research
is still all too often the same. What has taken place in the
meantime to prevent any form of evolution?
Of course, part of the problem can be identified as the inability of
the university system as a whole to deal with the overwhelming
demand for higher education brought on by the years of protest
in the 1960s — one of the claims to fundamental rights made by
Italy's youth. It is not, perhaps, a coincidence that the riots of
1967 began precisely in Valle Giulia, where dissatisfaction with
the inadequacy of the educational system was compounded by
concerns over the irrational nature of territorial policies after the
war. Ever since, the proliferation of conservative, insubstantial
micro-reforms has never succeeded in leading us to true
amendments in higher education, at least not in architecture.
Even if we assume that intervention in the system is the best
way to resolve problems related to a nation's academic culture,
in architecture this could only be translated into policies
for the built environment, namely the creation of a socio-
economic condition that is ready to welcome new incoming
professionals. This was the case in Spain (at what turned out
to be an extremely high cost) when it turned its attention to
design towards public space, an ideal training ground for young
architects. It is pointless to continue tweaking legislation in
order to alter the formal aspects of university regulations
without ever profoundly renewing the content in accordance
with a socioeconomic condition that is completely different than
the one in which the old institutions were founded.
The risk is that our universities focus obsessively on consolidating their identity based on traditions (sometimes false) that suffer from a stubborn inclination towards feudal offshoots. In contrast, it is desirable for institutes to take clear scientific positions regarding their disciplines, and attract students by their critical attitudes rather than their geographical locations. In short, if the time is not yet ripe to internationalise, then let the stances be honest, conscious and openly declared, rather than "stylistic" variants of provincialism (which are still in effect today).
But if the time is ripe — and it is — then we must rethink, from the ground up, the distribution mechanisms of academic power, where there is no balance between tenured positions and precarious jobs in research. As soon as possible, we must import the concept of the visiting professor. This is an expert who can bring external experience to the academic environment, attracted by fees high enough to make taking a specified period of time (no more than two or three years) out of professional practice economically feasible. At the end of the teaching cycle, the visiting professor can return to the employment market with an enhanced range of experience. If the fear is that such a mechanism might generate an excessive fragmentation of culture, then it is necessary to take the opposite approach and start with the students. Again, in Spain, research scholarships are available expressly for those who are still studying. Such an instrument is of capital importance, especially if we think of the different nuances attributed to architecture theory in Italy compared to other countries.
In the end, the Gordian knot is:
the (markedly Italian) inability to connect research to practice
other than in a few elegant syntactic formulas. Where have
we seen academia playing a crucial, avant-garde role in salient
urban planning issues in the last, say, 30 years? What school
has been able to channel the enormous intellectual capital that
young people have to offer into the production of new spatial
protocols? Although there were interesting workshops and
experimentation, how much of an effect have they had on a
national level, and what were the results beyond the confines
of the academic walls?
Of course, it has always been the case that the most interesting
research originates in independent research groups that form
within the very same institutions whose deficiencies they
intend to expose. But we cannot be satisfied with the fact that
this is the only added value these unrelated and pulverised
movements are able to confer to our institutions — and only
after immense effort, ludicrous financing and minimal
recognition. At most, our universities can only muster the image
of elephantine diploma factories whose products, in a certain
sense, have questionable value today.
The transmission of knowledge is under complete transformation; in fact, it has already been transformed. While architecture schools fall behind (in the best cases) in experimenting with semi-new educational models, and while civic society reorganises its cognitive faculties toward total connection, one might wonder about the role of magazines. Are they still interested in valiantly interacting with the places where new knowledge is supposed to be generated, or has the fervour (which was never peaceful, but perhaps the very soul of the golden age of Italian schools) fizzled out forever? The more this space for intellectual culture narrows, the greater one feels the necessity to recover it — for the sake of a sickly academia, obviously, but also for the publishing industry. Rossella Ferorelli (@r_ferorelli), PhD candidate in Architectural and Urban Design, Milan Polytechnic